Here is something that I have wanted to do for a long, long time, which is to blogify the pile of philosophy notes I still have left over from university. I was a marvelous student, but aimless. I blundered into graduating with two majors that I didn’t know what to do with, and made the bewildering choice to decline a minor in philosophy even though I had the credits to do it. Anyway, I am reasonably sure that with very few exceptions I took all the philosophy courses that were available at my little country alma mater.

People claim to talk to God all the time. Some high-profile people claim to not only hold discourse with The Almighty, but to receive hand-crafted mandates from him as well. Often these mandates involve running for public office. Or perhaps the message is broadly moral, always cessationist, some awful (but not really awful) behavior stirring the wrath of a supreme being, generally expressed in a turn of the weather. This cold snap was sent because of gay marriage, for example. Everybody must halt their support of it at once, or things will only get chillier.

Standard interpretations of the first bits of Genesis are very badly done. It isn’t, and never was, a story about something that happened. What it really is, is a story about the beginning of agriculture (and also the economic triumph of agriculture over shepherding), and the abandonment of the worship of trees.

This is a very big topic, but I’ll try to do the brief version. The Tree of Life is Asherah, i.e., the Sacred Tree at the heart of the Sacred Grove, which is always deep in (or “in the middle of”) the … Continue Reading